Professor Maxwell was so famous that we had heard of him when we were still at school. He was joint editor with A.A. Phillips of a very good anthology of poetry for use in schools: In Fealty to Apollo. When I first saw him at a first-year English lecture at the University of Melbourne he was exactly as I had pictured him: noble forehead, craggy face, deep voiced, with strong arms and a powerful upper body in a droopy tweed sports jacket. He had the head, arms and torso of a very powerful man joined to quite short legs; he was also slightly pigeon-toed, which gave his feet a tentative look, rather belying the majesty of his head and the authority of his voice. He brought books in to the lecture theatre, but never looked at them, lecturing in an intimate, spontaneous way, as if he and his listeners were good friends, joined in admiration of the works and the writers he spoke about. In his lecture on the Scottish Border Poets he would weep while reciting some of the ballads, which naturally became the stuff of awed legend.

Professor Maxwell loved all the masculine arts, boxing perhaps above all. The plaque that his friends and family have put on the site of the huts he built by the Howqua River in central Victoria carries one of his favourite quotations, from George Borrow’s Lavengro (1851): ‘We’ll now put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!’ With his long arms and strong shoulders, Professor Maxwell was probably a good boxer himself. He was also said to be a tremendous axeman, who could split shingles with one blow.